Cocktails & Conversation: Neil Denari, FAIA, and Aaron Betsky

Cocktails & Conversation is a series of dialogues about design that joins an architect with a critic, journalist, curator, or architectural historian to discuss current architecture design issues. For this digital program, Neil Denari, FAIA, Neil M. Denari Architects, will sit down with Aaron Betsky from Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture + Design.

Speaker:
Neil Denari, FAIA, Principal, Neil M. Denari Architects

Interviewer:
Aaron Betsky, Director, Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture + Design

Bartender:
Eben Klemm, mixologist and author

Neil Denari, FAIA is principal of the Los Angeles based office Neil M. Denari Architects and is a Professor of Architecture at UCLA. He received his B. Arch from the University of Houston in 1980 and an M.Arch from Harvard in 1982. He has been teaching for 35 years and was the Director of SCI-Arc from 1997-2002.

With NMDA, Denari has designed and built projects in Asia, North America, and Europe. NMDA’s most well-known project is HL23, located on the High Line in New York’s West Chelsea neighborhood. In 2015, Denari was elected to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) College of Fellows. He is the recipient of the AIA-LA Gold Medal (2011), AIA-LA Educator of the Year (2019), two National AIA Awards, a Progressive Architecture citation, and eight AIA Honor Awards.

Aaron Betsky is Director of the School of Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech. Previously, he was President of the School of Architecture at Taliesin. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including forthcoming volumes on Frank Lloyd Wright, and the landscape architecture firm Turenscape. He writes a twice-weekly blog for architectmagazine.com, Beyond Buildings. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), as well as Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he also directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture. His latest books, Making It Modern and Architecture Matters, were published last year.

Eben Klemm, former research biologist, writes cocktail and wine lists for restaurant and hotel openings around the world. He began bartending in the last century in upstate New York and has trained thousands of servers and bartenders in beginning and advanced beverage service, and his work has been featured in numerous publications. His cocktail book for beginners, The Cocktail Primer, was published by Andrews McNeel in 2009, and he is cocktail editor for World Policy Journal. Eben currently divides his time between New York, Los Angeles, and Portland and their respective interconnecting flights.